Some people read the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and have their lives changed.
I read the Life Changing Magic of Not Giving A F*ck and have an epiphany.
Mind you, most of the gist of the book is in the excerpt I just linked. The rest is good for a chortle if you have my kind of sense of humor and the occasional nugget of wisdom. Or some sort of nugget, anyway.
But basically, it’s about not caring so much about a) things that other people say you should care about – but you really don’t, in your heart of hearts – and b) things that make you mad and/or give you an ulcer.
Sarah Knight, the author stresses that one shouldn’t get that concept mixed up with “being an ass.” That is, you can stay polite, not say things that would trigger someone emotionally, and -still- not give a fuck.
Ie. guard your time, set your own boundaries, not get yourself worked up, while not intruding on someone else’s boundaries or working them up.
The term I really like, that’s not in the excerpt, and I’m shamelessly giving away here, even when it’s not mine to give, is “Fuck Budget.”
That is, you have a limited amount of Fucks to give, so spend ’em wisely.
—
The only itty bitty problem with that is my game time diminishes drastically while embracing that philosophy, and whatever and whenever I do play, I end up with very little to get huffy about.
With nothing to get huffy about, I ask myself, “Why blog?” “Do I want to blog today?” “Nah, I have limited time and limited Fucks to give. I don’t want to spend an hour making much ado about nothing. Let’s play a game. Or watch something on Netflix. Or tidy up.”
It’s still a haphazard practice that confuses me often though.
The odd thing about letting up on gaming (and specifically GW2) as the primary Fuck, is that my Fuck of the Moment has been jumping around wildly, and I’m no longer sure what I -do- care about.
I managed to focus my major Fuck Project for a week or so of scanning five IKEA Samla boxes of paperback books. A good 15-20 of ’em fit into one box, so do the math. It took a while.
But it was something that I’ve been aiming to do for a long time, and helps move my home one step further away from wannabe hoarder to actually having some negative space in one’s interior design.
I bribed myself (yet again) by putting a $10usd price tag on finishing each box, and giving myself permission to fritter it away in GW2’s gem store.
So far, I’ve only used $30 and took advantage of the current gold to gem price to convert gems into enough gold to treat myself to an entire set of Balthazar weapon skins, which were oddly quite cheap at 30ish gold per skin a week ago.
(I got stung with the last warhorn skin though, it shot up to 60g in the last few days and while someone is probably manipulating the price, I decided I couldn’t be arsed to wait patiently for another few weeks or months of waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak. 15 days of dailies, a little less with node harvesting, total warhorn skin price in dollars = $4.50usd, meh, whatever. I’d pay five bucks for peace of mind. Starbucks coffee costs more than that.)
Oh, and I bought the shameless cash grab Phoenix wing glider, because fire.
I -was- planning on spending my built up 14 Black Lion tickets on another collection for fun. But then I see the headlines on Reddit about how this set of skins is mysteriously account bound.
While I don’t really have much sympathy for skin flippers, I also don’t think it’s right that people who want the skin should be encouraged to play the Black Lion Chest lottery.
The established cycle has been that gamblers willing to take the risk for profit and/or whales with little head for probability buy the shit in return for (possibly empty) thrills, and the skins that get churned out are bought by people willing to spend gold on a sure thing.
It’s the ol’ Magic card loop. You can buy the gamble in a sealed pack or buy the desirable card that is already on display for a price tag by someone who opened lots of packs for it.
Kill the latter, and there goes the alternative choice. Haven’t we learned anything about reducing alternative choices by now? (Unless you’re selling 20 types of jam and encountering the paradox of choice, reducing two down to one = unhappy people.)
I’m not terribly bothered by it either way. See “Fucks to Give.” But eh, since I’m not craving for that particular set of skins aesthetically, it seems I may as well add some votes in the “not touching that with a ten-foot pole” direction.
Moral freefall indeed.
This travesty though.
I actually logged into the official forums to cast my vote.
Something I haven’t done since the first WvW poll (couldn’t bring myself to care that deeply about the other polls to get past the minor mental barrier of navigating to the page by clicking a link and logging in with a password.)
Moral freefall? More like escaped from orbit.
But what the fuck, right?
Maybe they’ll change it. Maybe they won’t. I can generate just enough Fuck given to express my opinion, and then it’s back to “shrug” again. Always been more of a heavy armor weight person anyway, and both of those are pleasingly cover-everything.
I dislike the divisiveness that raids bring, but when push comes to shove, I want to be on the side of the divide that can actually do shit.
So I play the raids while the conditions are still right and I have a regular team that can do them. Selfish? Yep. Ever so slightly hypocritical? Probably.
Not that I give a fuck anymore.
The operating principle is, do it while I still can. When I can’t, it’s time to not give a fuck and do something else. Like play another game.
(That, by the way, seems to be what 2-3 members of my current raid team have decided, since they stopped showing up for raids in favor of playing Overwatch.
Our raid leader is still exceptionally resourceful in finding replacements, which is why the raids continue, but I fear the day he vanishes.)
Another game, meanwhile, has been some exceptional gems like A Study in Steampunk – Choice by Gaslight. The first three chapters are available for free here.
It’s a lovely text adventure game that lets you play John Watson to a renamed Sherlock Holmes (or take Watson in a completely new and less doctoral direction) in a convincing fictional universe that draws from Victorian steampunk, Jack the Ripper and Holmes mythology, mixed with a dash of unique magic – healers and vampires are on the same spectrum here, depending on if you choose to give or drain “light” from another.
I binged for two to three days straight on this game, exploring all the tons of story paths, to the point I bought it for my iPad so I could play it while not home.
Still on a Sherlock Holmes kick, I ended up drawn to watching Elementary on Netflix, a slightly cheesy modern adaptation where Watson is a woman, aka Lucy Liu.
Despite the slight weirdness of these people existing in a parallel world where no one appears to have heard of the Victorian Age Sherlock Holmes, and thus don’t blink an eye when names like “Moriarty” cross their lips, the story of the cases and the Holmes style reveals are fun and entertaining enough for me to enjoy the series.
Just about finishing Season 1, and there’s a healthy amount of seasons and episodes to go, so I think my TV watching Fuck budget is set for the next month or thereabouts.
However, it’s hard to give a fuck simultaneously to Elementary and the next game I ended up messing with. Because that’s just too much story going on in two separate monitors… impossible to focus on. Shadowrun: Hong Kong is one hell of a story game.
Seeing it pop up on Humble Bundle reminded me that I’ve already owned it for goodness knows how long, and -haven’t- played it, despite enjoying the first two Shadowruns.
So I started playing it, and it’s still an excellent Shadowrun style RPG, with an added twist to the decking minigame so that it allows for both sneakiness and pattern-recognition to evade trouble, rather than devolve into yet another combat sequence, except only with your deckers. Now, combat is the last resort.
The game feels very hefty in terms of content. There’s tons of text to read, what seems like many conversation options with NPCs and your teammates, and it takes me the greater part of a night to get through one job (gotta talk to my NPCs after each job to see what’s changed, y’know?!)
And the jobs don’t seem to stop coming. Yikes.
Also on the “maybe someday soon” list is Witcher 1 and 2.
After watching Cohhcarnage stream Witcher 3’s Blood and Wine DLC, where I greatly enjoyed watching someone else play, I am a little tempted to give the series another try again.
The minor little stumbling block might be my perfectionism and desire for a good ending. I was crazy enough to save, re-load, and move back a day or two in saves in Shadowrun because I didn’t have a skill leveled up high enough to get a good ending on a job (where you earn an NPC teammate and still keep some other NPCs alive.) So I played another job, earned enough karma to level the appropriate skill, then replayed the job.
I understand that really doesn’t happen much in the Witcher series, and is more “get one thing at the cost of something else going awry.” It’s why I got depressed by Telltale’s Walking Dead after a while too.
We’ll see.
And the whole reason I was off watching Twitch streams was because I was trying to learn more about Total War: Warhammer. (Which is currently on hold, but rest assured, I avenged Hack Leg-Biter quite a bit already before I stopped.)
Gaming Fuck Budget = Overflowing.
Still taking plenty of attention are Fucks I Have to Give About Work (so that I have money, which I do very much give a fuck about having enough to suffice) and Fucks That Immediately Push Aside Everything Else Because Your Body Feels Like Shit (aka caught a cold, got a bacterial infection on the tail end of that viral cold, got given antibiotics that probably wiped out most of the usual gut bacteria… with the expected gastrointestinal distress that results, added insult to injury by eating something I really shouldn’t have, threw it back up at 2am…twice, and am now resolved to do the mild soup and nibbles of toast thing for the next couple of days until things go back to normal.)
Except the doctor did a blood test and is now hinting at scary words like “prediabetes,” which makes me think I better shove the Exercise Project and Healthier Diet Fucks a little higher up the priority list in the next couple of months and create a better normal.
I’m still nowhere near complete on the Fuck Clutter project (or is that Clutter Fuck?) either, and my arbitrary July deadline looms.
Yep. Definitely scattered. Decidedly haphazard.
Nothing I can do except not give it too many fucks and take things a day at a time though.
Why I Game 